No photographic documentation nor video was allowed during these private one on one performances, above is the photo of the empty performance space that was created by Amelia Winger-Bearskin for the performance as held in Sao Paulo, Brazil for the Verbo Performance Festival 2011

Performance for an Audience of One, 2010
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Nashville – EUA

In my performance art, I seek to create connection between the artist and the audience participant—something that is non-mediated, but structured. Something that is experienced, un-manipulated.  The success of a key work this past year created a unique performance experience for the audience, Performance for an Audience of One.
Performance for an Audience of One (from the catalogue essay by Laura Hutson):
Designed to increase the interactivity of the art-going experience, Performance for an Audience of One is a private, one-on-one performance Winger-Bearskin tailors for each individual. She strips away any artifice that makes traditional performance a spectacle rather than a communion. There is no audience, no separation between artist and spectator, and no documentation or obstruction. The result is pure performance, deconstructed as an open exchange between participants.
About the inspiration for the work:
Behind the scenes, backstage, in our dressing room, before or after or during the show we would be performing for each other while changing our clothes. We would trip over sleeping actors as we practiced our dance steps or singing our lies while sewing a split seam. We passed the time in hushed voices waiting for our cue, sometimes staring into each other's eyes while we powdered our faces, and we performed for each other the way you can for your sister or your mother, we performed the way you do for a lover when we all know all the words. I felt an energy in the dressing room, I didn't need the stage lights or the audience, here waiting with you, I was home
The appointments available for the audience participants to choose from are:
Tea for Two, Bedtime Story, Hair, Song for You, Makeup, By Heart, Trade, Massage, Recital, Fragrance, Play, Ink, Darkness and Light and Dessert.

These short descriptions provided an element of mystery. It suggested an implied, intimate trust with participants agreeing to spend a 15-minute appointment alone in a room with the performer. No documentation was given to increase the mystery and trust between participants. Each performance depended on the participant, thereby ensuring that each performance was a unique work. The participant performed as much for me as I did for them. It was an experience of actions.
A participant,Veronica Kavass, Critic and Curator based in Brooklyn, NY, wrote of her own experience as an audience participant in the performance:

At 9 pm on a Saturday, I waited in the front entrance of a former hosiery mill for my turn in Amelia Winger‐Bearskin’s “Performance for an Audience of One.” It reminded me of waiting to go into a haunted house when I was kid: large, old building—once functional, now fun. I had no idea what to expect, and former audience members were returning from Amelia’s lair with mysterious grins. They wouldn’t report what happened—except for the man who unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a colorful drawing on his chest. I was given a “performance menu” to choose from. From the fifteen choices, I had a hard time deciding between “Bedtime Story” and “Trade.” All the selections seemed completely innocuous and whimsical. I remained suspicious until I was taken down the long hallway to Seed Space where Amelia welcomed me into her strange little world. As tradition goes, I am not allowed to reveal what happened—and I like it better that way. I will say that Oscar Wilde, a postcard, and a loud train were involved.

Trained‐opera singer and transmedia artist, Winger‐Bearskin specializes in performance dynamics. Commonly, the success of a performance is determined by audience response. In this case, the performance is tailored to the audience because the audience is a participating actor. Furthermore, there is no acting. All the performances are trading sessions (which made me wonder what “Trade” was actually like. I picked “Bedtime Stories”). So for whom do you applaud at the end of the performance? You pat yourself on the back. It fits in the vein of Tino Sehgal’s recent Guggenheim exhibition “This Progress”—an interactive exhibition that begins with a small child asking you, the museum‐goer, what progress is and concludes in conversation with a senior citizen at the top of the architectural rotunda. Like Winger‐Bearskin, Sehgal prohibited documentation and requested that people avoid divulging on their experience within the exhibition.

Winger‐Bearskin is—as the Native American part of her name hints—a spiritual artist. She is devising intimate interactive performances to create bonds, to induce self‐reflection, and to bring out the performer in everyone. This type of performance is part of the progressive anti‐spectator, anti‐loneliness campaign occurring in contemporary art all over the world.

Laura Hutson served as an usher for the performance. Laura wrote from the perspective of the Usher about her experience with the performance work:

Amelia Winger‐Bearskin’s “Performance for an Audience of One” is an experiment in liminality, of working at the blurred line between performer and audience, real life and theater. By using social forms appropriated from the theater to collapse the distance between performer and audience, Winger‐Bearskin transforms her audience into active participants. For the piece, each guest was asked in advance to choose a type of appointment, and Winger‐Bearskin assembled a performance piece particularly suited for that individual.
Performance for an Audience of One” is inspired by the theater, but not public performance. Rather, Winger‐Bearskin bases her work on the interaction among performers backstage. “Behind the scenes,” writes Winger‐Bearskin in her personal invitation to the piece, “backstage, in our dressing room, before or after or during the show we would be performing for each other while changing our clothes.” Her only prop is a curtain, a tool traditionally used to separate the stage from its audience, but in this performance the interaction is meant to occur behind the curtain, where there is no audience. She is not imitating theater, but subverting it and rearranging its elements to create a new definition of performance that is more interactive, more intimate, and much more open to interpretation...
Victor Turner calls ritual a “transformative experience that goes to the root of each person’s being and finds in that root something profoundly communal and shared.” The second person to participate in Winger‐Bearskin’s piece was a man in his forties who had never met the artist before, but had read about the piece in an email and decided to make an appointment. He emerged from the gallery spilling over with ideas. He told me that the piece “turned the concept of performance on its head.”

Performance for an Audience of One, was one of a series of works I would call "Invisible Performances." These performances relied on audience participation, and do not exist without an audience participant present. They are not documented through video and are meant to be experienced live. They would never be shown in a gallery setting through their documentation alone.
In Sao Paulo the room created for the performance will be semi-transparent so that viewers can see the silhouettes of the participants one on one performing with the performer.  Participants will be able to sign up for the performance the day of the event.